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<blockquote>It seems to me that the most disastrous consequences must follow upon our believing that anything false is found in the sacred books: that is to say that the men by whom the Scripture has been given to us, and committed to writing, did put down in these books anything false. . . . If you once admit into such a high sanctuary of authority one false statement ... there will not be left a single sentence of those books which, if appearing to any one difficult in practice or hard to believe, may not by the same fatal rule be explained away, as a statement in which, intentionally, . . . the author declared what was not true (''Letters of St Augustine'' 28.3).</blockquote>
By the time of the [[Reformation]], there was still no official doctrine of inerrancy. For [[Martin Luther]] (1483-1546), for example, "inspiration did not insure inerrancy in all details. Luther recognizes mistakes and inconsistencies in Scripture and treated them with lofty indifference because they did not touch the heart of the Gospel."<ref name="cambible">Bainton, "The Bible in the Reformation," in e.d. Greenslade, S.L., ''The Cambridge History of the Bible Vol 3: The West from the Reformation to the Present'', Cambridge University Press 1963, 12-13.</ref> When Matthew appears to confuse [[Book of Jeremiah|Jeremiah]] with [[Book of Zechariah|Zechariah]] in Matt. 27:9, Luther wrote that "Such points do not bother me particularly."<ref name="cambible" /> The [[Christian humanism|Christian humanist]] and one of the leading scholars of the [[northern Renaissance]], [[Erasmus]] (1466-1536), was also unconcerned with minor errors not impacting theology, and at one point, thought that Matthew mistook one word for another. In a letter to [[Johannes Eck]], Erasmus wrote that “Nor, in my view, would the authority of the whole of Scripture be instantly imperiled, as you suggest, if an evangelist by a slip of memory did put one name for another, Isaiah for instance instead of Jeremiah, for this is not a point on which anything turns.”<ref name="wood" /> The same point of view held true for [[John Calvin]] (1509-1564), who wrote that "It is well known that the Evangelists were not very concerned with observing the time sequences."<ref name="hendel" /> The doctrine of inerrancy, however, began to develop as a response to these Protestant attitudes. Whereas the [[Council of Trent]] only held that the Bible's authority was "in matters of faith and morales", the [[Jesuit]] and [[Cardinal (Catholic Church)|cardinal]] [[Robert Bellarmine]] (1542-1621) argued in his 1586 ''De verbo Dei'', the first volume of his multi-volume ''Disputationes de controversiis christianae fidei adversus hujus temporis haereticos'' that "There can be no error in Scripture, whether it deals with faith or whether it deals with morals/mores, or whether it states something general and common to the whole Church, or something particular and pertaining to only one person." Bellarmine's views were extremely important in his condemnation of Galileo and Catholic-Protestant debate, as the Protestant response was to also affirm his heightened understanding of inerrancy.<ref name="hendel" />
During the 18th and 19th centuries and in the aftermath of the [[Age of Enlightenment|Enlightenment]] critique of religion, various episodes of the Bible (for example the [[Genesis flood narrative|Noahide worldwide flood]],<ref>Plimer, Ian (1994), ''Telling Lies for God: Reason vs Creationism'', Random House</ref> the [[Genesis creation narrative|creation in six days]], and the [[Adam and Eve|creation of women from a man's rib]]) began increasingly to be seen as legendary rather than as literally true. This led to further questioning of the veracity of biblical texts. According to an article in ''Theology Today'' published in 1975, "There have been long periods in the history of the church when biblical inerrancy has not been a critical question. It has in fact been noted that only in the last two centuries can we legitimately speak of a formal doctrine of inerrancy. The arguments pro and con have filled many books, and almost anyone can join in the debate".<ref name="infallible">{{cite journal|last=Coleman|journal=Theology Today| volume = 31|issue = 4|year=1975|title=Biblical Inerrancy: Are We Going Anywhere?|doi=10.1177/004057367503100404|first1=R. J.|pages=295–303}}</ref>
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